Hear me out, readers. As a young, prospective student touring the grounds of The University of Alabama, you probably noticed the grandeur of the pristine columns highlighting the southern architecture of the academic buildings, and the crisp green of the expansive Quad that invites students to embark on friendly sporting competition or just to lounge in jubilant apathy.
These features, along with the vast shadow cast by the great Bryant-Denny Stadium, allured us all to this institution and allowed both our parents and ourselves to overlook an unfortunately prevalent problem on campus: student smoking.
The use of cigarettes has become so mainstream among the student body that the adverse health effects of smoking are too often forgotten. For instance, every student that was required to take a middle school level health class knows the inhalation of smoke can lead to mouth and lung cancer due to the dozens of known carcinogens present in cigarettes, and most probably know the average smoker is prone to lose fourteen years of their projected lifespan. But did you know that one of the main ingredients that gives a cigarette its flavor is urea, the same substance found in human urine?
Despite the general decline in the popularity of smoking since President Nixon signed a bill in 1970 banning the advertising of cigarettes on television, the concentration of nicotine present in each individual cigarette has increased as much as 11 percent since 1995. More nicotine means more individuals are likely to become dangerously addicted, thus instances of cancer, emphysema, coronary heart disease and even infertility are likely to increase proportionally.
The real tragedy on campus is the amount of students who suffer from secondhand smoke, whether it be from walking into a dorm whose entrance is blanketed by smokers or the familiarity of getting stuck behind a slow moving gaggle of cigarette users on a narrow sidewalk.
Nearly 50,000 people in the United States die from the effects of secondhand smoking every year, but luckily the American public is taking action. More and more businesses and college campuses are taking the initiative to ban smoking from their property in an effort to improve their image and keep in mind the health of their respective employees and students.
Unfortunately, by trying to maintain a sort of Southern tradition, the Crimson Tide has lagged behind the rest of the country, including Auburn, in terms of eradicating or at least controlling smoking on campus. However many students, professors and administrators have taken notice, and the first tobacco-related survey ever was done on campus last year.
The results were both alarming and promising, and are outlined as follows: Only 10 percent of current students are smokers, but 59 percent, a clear majority, acknowledge smoking as dangerous and very harmful to health. The University of Alabama’s traditional Southern lifestyle is guilty of getting younger students hooked on smoking, as the survey revealed an increase in the percentage of student smokers based on time on campus, from eight percent of freshman to a scary 26 percent of seniors.
The greatest statistic surfaced by the poll was the number of students in favor of a University-wide policy change: Nearly 57 percent of all students, a clear majority, are in favor of banning smoking outright on campus.
Thus today a team of students, backed by an increasing number of administrators and student-run organizations, is pushing for a blanket ban on campus, and the movement is seeking the support of the student body. Of course it would be wrongly optimistic to expect current smokers to immediately relinquish their habit, so a second plan for designated smoking areas, which would be a great compromise between the two sides of smokers and non-smokers, has been proposed.
The purpose of this column and the goal of the movement is to raise awareness and unify the University population in an effort to address the issue of cigarette use and quickly create a mandate that will control smoking to both improve the image of the Crimson Tide as it continues to splash onto the national scene as one of the best public schools in the country and also better the overall health of the student body so each individual will live longer and continue to touch lives all around the world.
Christian Shannon is a freshman majoring in chemical engineering.
